I have 3 answers, depending on what level you’re asking:
There’s no such thing as causation, and maybe not even time and change. Everything was determined in the initial configuration of quantum waveforms in the distant past of your lightcone. The experience of time and change is just a side-effect of your embeddedness in this giant static many-dimensional universe.
Causation cannot be determined by pure observation. It can be inferred pretty strongly, if there are “natural experiments” that isolate A and B, and A happens before B and we can’t find anything else that might be upstream causes. Yes, absence of evidence, in the bayesean sense, is evidence of absence.
Causation can be pretty strongly determined by directed experiment. The experimenter IS the upstream cause of the change, and carefully manipulates A in ways that other causal effects are isolated from what happens to B.
Remember, causality (like everything about undersanding the world) is a model—it lives in the map, not the territory. All models are wrong, some models are useful. This one turns out VERY useful in making your way through the world, and in understanding likely chains of future events.
I have 3 answers, depending on what level you’re asking:
There’s no such thing as causation, and maybe not even time and change. Everything was determined in the initial configuration of quantum waveforms in the distant past of your lightcone. The experience of time and change is just a side-effect of your embeddedness in this giant static many-dimensional universe.
Causation cannot be determined by pure observation. It can be inferred pretty strongly, if there are “natural experiments” that isolate A and B, and A happens before B and we can’t find anything else that might be upstream causes. Yes, absence of evidence, in the bayesean sense, is evidence of absence.
Causation can be pretty strongly determined by directed experiment. The experimenter IS the upstream cause of the change, and carefully manipulates A in ways that other causal effects are isolated from what happens to B.
Remember, causality (like everything about undersanding the world) is a model—it lives in the map, not the territory. All models are wrong, some models are useful. This one turns out VERY useful in making your way through the world, and in understanding likely chains of future events.